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BlogMay 2012

It’s now been eighteen months since the CCDC joined the big wide world of Social Media Marketing, and after a shaky start where we were lucky if we could manage one status update a week and were unsure of what a hashtag was, we have now really hit our stride.

When first embarking on our plan to launch social media profiles to better engage with our user community, we were uncertain as to exactly what we should be talking about. Do we just talk about software releases? Maybe post the odd photo of the building? While we did indeed start with these, over time our Facebook and Twitter profiles have grown into a vibrant community where we discuss user preferences, talk about the company’s social activities, post updates from events we’re attending and share interesting scientific news stories from around the world. Among our most popular Facebook features are “Meet a CCDC staff member”, where we post a photo and a bio of someone in the company, “Featured Structure Friday”, where we post an image of a pertinent structure and details of its authorship, and links to our tutorials and “how-to” videos on our YouTube channel.

Given the task of redeveloping the CCDC website, it was decided to look at everything again - both in terms of the site layout and the content. It was felt that the current website had been allowed to develop with new pages added as and when they were required, and a new site gave the opportunity to arrange things differently. We’ve taken a fresh look at the site as a whole, with the aim of producing a better overall experience for the user. To this end we’ve made quite extensive changes to the layout and added lots of new content, hopefully giving a better idea of all the activities that go on at CCDC.

We’ve worked on trying to make it easy to see the full range of products and services the CCDC offers. A new feature is the Solutions Guide (in the Solutions section) that recommends tools to help with aspects of your work in the broad categories of structure based drug design, medicinal chemistry, pharmaceutical formulation and development, crystallography and research and education. We’ve also improved our customer support by providing a comprehensive database of FAQs, to help you solve any issues you come across as quickly as possible. All software downloads are now accessible from a single page, and a new resources section offers material such as case studies, videos and CSD statistics.